Would Anna be happier without me? Could she conceive with someone else’s sperm? Could she have a baby without IVF? Maybe we just weren’t compatible in that way. It filled me with self-loathing that I could be the cause of her unhappiness. That I was walking under a ladder, black cat crossing my path – all kinds of bad luck. If I was being entirely honest, the resentment wasn’t only one-way: I had given up a lot for her. My plans to travel the world. The new job I was offered. My friends when I had left my village. Sometimes I imagined standing at the airport six years before. Anna on one side, and all my hopes and dreams on the other. Would I give it all up again? No matter how much we bickered, the days, sometimes weeks that passed without any meaningful conversation, I knew that I would. Our time together wasn’t all bad, it was just that the bad times were pretty fucking terrible, but every now and then I’d glimpse the Anna of old. Last weekend, for instance, we had been to the engagement party of a guy I worked with and in the back room of the pub was a pool table.

‘You up for it?’ I had asked her. It had been about two years since we had played.

‘Bring it on.’ She had kicked off her heels and hitched up her tight black dress and thrashed me three times in a row. Afterwards, we had danced to S Club 7, both reaching for the stars and had staggered home at 2 a.m. clutching a white plastic bag bursting with kebab and chips. We had sat cross-legged on the lounge floor, picking meat out of the pitta.

‘We couldn’t do this if we had kids,’ I had drunkenly said. Had stupidly said. I hadn’t meant it the way it sounded and the mood was ruined, but for those precious few hours before I stuck my foot firmly in my mouth, we had laughed. Properly laughed.

‘Are you hungry?’ Anna asked now but I was one step ahead of her, guessing that the salmon on the shopping list was meant to be our dinner.

‘Sweet and sour chicken?’ I waved the menu in front of me, a white flag of sorts.

She placed a hand on her stomach. ‘I don’t know if I fancy Chinese tonight.’ She often felt bloated when her period was due. She was wearing her time-of-the-month pyjamas. All baggy and worn. I didn’t like to ask her if she had started yet. Didn’t fancy getting my head bitten off again.

‘What do you fancy?’ I wiggled my eyebrows alluringly but she didn’t laugh. She didn’t rip my clothes off either. She wouldn’t until the bloody app told her to.

‘Curry?’ she asked.

Garlic breath and raw onion salad.

‘Perfect,’ I said.